A Weblog by One Humble Bookman on Topics of Interest to Discerning Readers, Including (Though Not Limited To) Science Fiction, Books, Random Thoughts, Fanciful Family Anecdotes, Publishing, Science Fiction, The Mating Habits of Extinct Waterfowl, The Secret Arts of Marketing, Other Books, Various Attempts at Humor, The Wonders of New Jersey, the Tedious Minutiae of a Boring Life, Science Fiction, No Accounting (For Taste), And Other Weighty Matters.

Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler is a Vassar alum, class of 1990. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (mostly for the Science Fiction Book Club), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and related products to accountants for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters as Senior Marketer for Corporate Counsel. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Monday, September 03, 2012

According to the inflexible calendar of American expectations, summer ends today -- even though, by other calendrical measures, there are three more weeks of hot weather before the equinox hits. So I hope you've all had as much summer-time fun as you can stand, since that is now all over.

(Offer void in the Southern Hemisphere and where prohibited by law. Residents of Iowa will need to complete a test of skill.)

But, like every other week, this last week of Official American Summer brought books to my doorstep -- dropped off there by delivery-folks, and sent by publicists from some of the many fine publishing organizations still sticking words on paper -- and those books may be of interest to you good people. I haven't read any of these books yet, since they just arrived, but here's what I can tell you about them:

Pocket Los Angeles is a nicely portable guide from the folks at Lonely Planet -- this particular one was written by Adam Skolnik, who gets no cover credit but a smouldering pseudo-romance-novel-cover author photo at the back to (presumably) make up for it. As the title implies, it's pocket-sized, with a lot of color photography among the icon-filled, heavily-designed pages -- a good travel book packs a lot of details onto each page, and this is a good-looking example of that model. There's also a map stuck into the back. What I have is the third edition, which just came out in May.

I get a strong yaoi vibe from Hyouta Fujitama's Tale of the Waning Moon, Vol. 3 -- and you might, too, just from looking at that cover. From the back cover, I gather that the main characters are Ryuka and Ixto, the former of which is under a spell that makes him irresistible to the same sex, but I have no idea what else they are, what kind of culture those names (or outfits) would come from, or anything other than the fact that this book features cute boys getting busy for the enjoyment of a female audience. (Though perhaps that will be enough.) It's from Yen Press, and publishes this month.

Also from Yen this month is GA: Geijutsuka Art Design Class, Vol. 4, from Satoko Kiyuduki. (I reviewed the first volume a few years back for ComicMix, and thought it was a little too in-jokey for me; but you may be further in those jokes that I am to begin with.)

James Enge begins a new series of novels about his character Morlock Ambrosius (son of Merlin, complicated antihero, and so forth) with A Guile of Dragons, the opening of "A Tournament of Shadows." This is a prequel to the previous Morlock novels; I see from the opening chapters that he hasn't even been born yet as the book begins. The main action of Guile concerns a war between dwarves and dragons, which seems to be in the secondary world Morlock travels in the prior novels -- so readers should not be worried that Guile is entirely about an infant Morlock. This novel was published by Pyr on August 21st.

I mentioned The Rapture of the Nerds -- a collaborative fix-up novel by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, adding a new section and some corrections to their previously-published novellas "Jury Service" and "Appeals Court" -- when I saw it as a bound galley, and now I mention it again now that it's a real finished book. It's a Tor hardcover, officially on sale tomorrow.

And last for this week is another big Osamu Tezuka project from Vertical -- the folks who have reprinted his Buddha, MW, Ode to Kirihito, Dororo, and several others -- with the first half of Message to Adolf. This was one of his last major works, serialized in the 1980s, and, starting in the 1930s, tells the story of three men named Adolf: Nazi official's son Kaufmann, Jewish baker's son Kamil, and Hitler. This first volume was just published in late August; the second half will come out in November.